Social Theory: Kimberlé Crenshaw

7th Nov 2022 by Anne Kirstine Rønn

In 1976, five black women sued General Motors for race and sex discrimination. The company’s workforce segregation, they argued, left black women in a uniquely unfortunate situation. They could not take black jobs, because these were meant for men. Neither could they take women’s jobs, which were meant for white women only. The court, however, dismissed their claim, arguing that race and sex could be treated separately (Crenshaw, 2013)

Thirteen years later, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a young scholar from UCLA, published a landmark essay, criticizing the court’s decision. In the essay Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, Crenshaw argued that the case against General Motors in fact illustrated that repression and discrimination can only be understood when considering the intersectionalnature of identities. 

The term intersectionality, which Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in this 1989 essay, is today a focal point in studies of identity, discrimination and injustice. It contributes to cement Crenshaw’s status as one of the most influential recent scholars, not only within legal theory, but also in the broader fields of sociology and contentious politics. In this intervention, I reflect on the legacy of Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality and discuss its application within studies of the Middle East. 

Intellectual (and practical) contribution

Intersectionality is widely understood as the critical insight that identities such as social class, race and gender are reciprocally constructing phenomena, and that this reciprocity shapes complex social inequalities (Collins, 2015). Today, the concept has become so dominant that it is rare to find a textbook in social sciences without some reference to the "intersection of race, gender, and class” (Belkhir & Barnett, 2001, p. 158). However, it was born out of Crenshaw and her colleagues’ early efforts to challenge the way race and gender was dealt with in legal studies.  

Already as a law student at Harvard, Crenshaw was part of a movement that sought to push the faculty to offer courses on issues of minority rights and race. In 1986, when she joined UCLA School of Law, she started gathering colleagues around a new intellectual project that should provide a critical and coherent account of race and law. Critical Race Theory, as the project came to be titled, became a widely used conceptual framework for examining intersectional injustices within thelaws and legal institutions (Crenshaw, 2001). 

The term intersectionality, however, was never intended to be confined to the study of legal discrimination. Neither was it supposed to serve only as a theoretical concept. As Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) note, intersectionality has today evolved as an interdisciplinary analytical approach and a practice. It informs the empirical study of how identities and systems of oppression overlap and reinforce each other (Collins, 2015), and it serves as a strategy to address hidden modes of repression across different spheres in society; from social movements to workplaces (Brewer & Dundes, 2018; Gökarıksel & Smith, 2017; Lopez & García, 2014). 

Recently, intersectional thinking has also come to play an increasingly salient role for social movements and civil society. It has been at the core of the discussions about inclusivity in the Occupy Movement and the feminist marches in the United States (Boothroyd et al., 2017; Wrenn, 2019), and it features regularly in the vocabulary and repertoires of activists. In the Occupy Movement, for instance, activists practiced intersectional thinking through workshops, where participants discussed power inequalities and positionality (Juris et al., 2012).

In application

It has taken a bit longer for intersectionality to gain foothold within studies of the Middle East. However, there has been a growing tendency among Middle East scholars to adopt the term, especially to scrutinize the role of gender and sexuality in the region’s contentious politics (Moghadam, 2008; Rahman, 2010). Notably, intersectional approaches to the Arab Uprisings have contributed to shed light on the unique effects authoritarian regimes have on women from different social backgrounds and facilitate a deeper understanding of the motivations and fears women had in relation to participating in the uprisings against these regimes (Salem, 2014; Stephan & Charrad, 2020).

Recently, studies have also drawn attention to the ways intersectional thinking has been practiced among social movements in the region, particularly feminists and the LGBT+ community. In their study of feminist activism in during the 2010-2011 uprising Tunisia (Clark & Krichah, 2021) show that intersectionality was one of the primary concerns of the secular feminist groups that emerged from and operated in the uprising, and in their recent book, Nagle and Fakhoury (2021) explain how intersectional activism has been practiced within Lebanon’s LGBT+ community. As pointed out by Nagle (2021, p. 7), the past years have seen a rise of“intersectionalists” across divided societies in the region. These actors, who have emerged at the grassroots level, “seek to identify the multiple pinpoints through which the sectarian system creates inequalities while simultaneously creating alliances across marginalized groups to attack the system at its weak points”. 

While intersectionality has mostly been used in relation to gender and sexuality in the Middle East, the potential of an intersectional approach to the study of Middle East politics and society extends beyond these topics. First of all, intersectionality presents a way to challenge thetendency of past studies to adopt sectarianism as the dominant explanation to social and political developments. As several scholars have pointed out, such one-dimensional focus on sect-based divides overshadows the role of factors such as class, gender, tribalism and regionalism (Deeb, 2020; Ghosn & Parkinson, 2019; Majed, 2016, 2021; Makdisi, 2017; Nucho, 2016; Ozcelik, 2022). Here, intersectionality offers a grip to explore class and other identities as interrelated with sect. 

Secondly, an intersectional approach prompts Middle East scholars to examine inclusion, marginalization and protest participation in a more critical light and may help turn focus on issues that fall under the radar. The Lebanese October Uprising serves as a good example of this. If we examine inclusion of sect, class and regions separately, the uprising appears to successful in its inclusion of citizens. Surveys among protesters show there was relatively even participation across sects (Bou Khater & Majed, 2020). Likewise, the uprising was celebrated for its diversity in terms of socialclass backgrounds and for the fact that people took to the streets across the entire country. However, if we examine inclusion through an intersectional lens, we can identify subgroups within the population which were difficult to include, due to their particular combinations of sect, class and geographic belonging. An example of such group is residents from the neighborhoods of Khandak el Ghamiq and Dahiyeh, two Shiite majority neighborhoods in and around Beirut, which are known as strongholds of Amal Movement and Hezbollah. While protesters expressed strong statements of solidarity with Shiite protesters from other parts of Lebanonand with lower class segments, negative stereotyping of residents from the two areas prevailed. These stereotypes cannot be understood with reference to social class, sect or geography alone. To understand why the uprising fell short inpromoting solidarity with residents of Khandak el Ghamiqand Dahiyeh Rather, we must look to their intersectingidentities as predominantly lower-class Shiites from areas with unique political, cultural, and historical features.

This is not to claim that studies of Middle East societies become simplistic and one-dimensional without the application of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work. The interrelation of identities has been dealt with empirically in much existing research on the region and can be studied without explicit theoretical reference to critical race theory and intersectionality. However, to develop our knowledge on the relation between sect, class, geography and other identities, we need a common language and systematic analytical approach. It is on this aspect Crenshaw has valuable insights to offer. 

References

Belkhir, J. A., & Barnett, B. M. (2001). Race, gender and class intersectionality. Race, Gender & Class, 8(3), 157-174. 

Boothroyd, S., Bowen, R., Cattermole, A., Chang-Swanson, K., Daltrop, H., Dwyer, S., . . . Nagra, J. (2017). (Re) producing feminine bodies: emergent spaces through contestation in the Women’s March on Washington. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(5), 711-721. 

Bou Khater, L., & Majed, R. (2020). Lebanon’s 2019 October Revolution: Who Mobilized and Why. Asfari institute for civil society and citizenship. 

Brewer, S., & Dundes, L. (2018). Concerned, meet terrified: Intersectional feminism and the Women's March. Paper presented at the Women's Studies International Forum.

Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 785-810. 

Clark, J. A., & Krichah, S. (2021). Secular feminism in Tunisia: a political generations approach. Globalizations, 1-17. 

Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality's definitional dilemmas. Annual review of sociology, 41, 1-20. 

Crenshaw, K. (2013). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. In Feminist legal theories (pp. 23-51): Routledge.

Crenshaw, K. W. (2001). The first decade: Critical reflections, or a foot in the closing door. UClA L. REv., 49, 1343. 

Deeb, L. (2020). Beyond sectarianism: Intermarriage and social difference in Lebanon. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52(2), 215-228. 

Ghosn, F., & Parkinson, S. E. (2019). “Finding” sectarianism and strife in Lebanon. PS: Political Science & Politics, 52(3), 494-497. 

Gökarıksel, B., & Smith, S. (2017). Intersectional feminism beyond US flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(5), 628-644. 

Juris, J. S., Ronayne, M., Shokooh-Valle, F., & Wengronowitz, R. (2012). Negotiating Power and Difference within the 99%. Social Movement Studies, 11(3-4), 434-440. 

Lopez, M. C., & García, S. R. (2014). Political intersectionality within the Spanish Indignados social movement. Research in social movements, conflicts and change, 37, 3-25. 

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Majed, R. (2021). In defense of intra-sectarian divide: Street mobilization, coalition formation, and rapid realignments of sectarian Boundaries in Lebanon. Social forces, 99(4), 1772-1798. 

Makdisi, U. (2017). The mythology of the sectarian Middle East. 

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Nagle, J. (2021). Disarticulation and chains of equivalence: agonism and non-sectarian movements in post-war Beirut. Third World Quarterly, 1-18. doi:10.1080/01436597.2021.1948830

Nagle, J., & Fakhoury, T. (2021). Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Postwar Lebanon: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Nucho, J. R. (2016). Everyday sectarianism in urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, public services, and power(Vol. 10): Princeton University Press.

Ozcelik, B. (2022). The Politics of Race and Racialisation in the Middle East: Routledge.

Rahman, M. (2010). Queer as intersectionality: Theorizing gay Muslim identities. Sociology, 44(5), 944-961. 

Salem, S. (2014). The 2011 Egyptian Uprising: Framing Events Through the Narratives of Protesters. Revolution as a Process: The Case of the Egyptian Uprising, 1, 21. 

Stephan, R., & Charrad, M. M. (2020). Women Rising: In and Beyond the Arab Spring: NYU Press.

Wrenn, C. (2019). Pussy grabs back: bestialized sexual politics and intersectional failure in protest posters for the 2017 women’s march. Feminist Media Studies, 19(6), 803-821.